Wolfgang Schaeuble, the German finance minister who’s taking a hard line on Greece’s debt woes, says he’d gladly swap burdens with his American counterpart.

“I offered my friend Jack Lew these days that we could take Puerto Rico into the euro zone if the U.S. were willing to take Greece into the dollar union,” Schaeuble said at an event in Frankfurt Thursday. Lew, the U.S. Treasury secretary, “thought that was a joke,” Schaeuble said.

Puerto Rico, a U.S. commonwealth, is struggling with $72 billion in debt that its governor says the island can’t repay.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men gather on a balcony as they watch the funeral of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of the ultra-religious Shas political party, in Jerusalem October 7, 2013. More than half a million mourners turned out on Monday for the funeral of Yosef, an Iraqi-born sage who transformed an Israeli underclass of Sephardic Jews of Middle East heritage into a powerful political force.

Ovadia Yosef, an ultra-orthodox Sephardic Israeli rabbi whose popularity among religious Israelis, particularly those whose families came to Israel from the Arab world, led to the creation of the Shas movement and a hard lurch right in Israeli politics, is being praised throughout Israel after his passing today.

Dan Murphy is a staff writer for the Monitor’s international desk, focused on the Middle East. Murphy, who has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and more than a dozen other countries, writes and edits Backchannels. The focus? War and international relations, leaning toward things Middle East.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef in Jerusalem, April 20, 1997.

Eyal Warshavsky/AP/File

Enlarge Hundreds of thousands of his supporters took the streets of Jerusalem to mourn. Former Israeli President Shimon Peres visited with Mr. Yosef at his hospital bedside just hours before he passed, tenderly kissing his hand and forehead, according to The Jerusalem Post. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a statement issued by his office, spoke of his «profound grief» and said that «the Jewish People have lost one of the wisest men of his generation.»

There is no doubt that Yosef is a major figure in Israeli political and social history – he arrived in Israel at the age of four, in the mid-1920s, and the power of the political movement he built is responsible for the public praise he’s garnering today. But Yosef’s undisguised bigotry and religious political extremism could also prove awkward for politicians like Mr. Netanyahu, who just last week complained that Iranians aren’t allowed to wear jeans or listen to Western music by the country’s own religious extremists (never mind that neither of his assertions were true).

Netanyahu has been campaigning of late against any rapprochement between the US and Iran, warning that seeming Iranian willingness to negotiate over its nuclear program is a trap and that the Islamic Republic’s leaders are fundamentally unstable and untrustworthy.

«They’re governed by Ayatollah Khamenei. He heads a cult. That cult is wild in its ambitions and its aggression,” Netanyahu told NBC last week. In his speech at the UN last month, he complained of the «fanaticism» of Iran’s religiously based state.

Yet he and many Israeli leaders embrace and praise Yosef, the Baghdad-born cleric who served as Israel’s chief Sephardi rabbi for a decade before focusing on direct political power. His religiously inspired views have given more political power to clerics in Israel, and his ultimate agenda frightened non-Jews.

For instance, in 2010 he said in a weekly Saturday night sermon that the sole purpose God put non-Jews on earth was to be servants to Jews.

«Goyim (gentiles, non-Jews) were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel,» he said, according to the Jerusalem Post. «Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why gentiles were created.» An «effendi» is a lord, or a master, in Arabic.

Yosef also favored the large number of ultra-Orthodox men who eschew modern education, focus only on Torah study, and are exempted from military service in Israel while largely subsisting on government handouts.

It was his comments about non-Jews that were the ugliest. In 2010 he said of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the people he leads that «all these evil people should perish from this world. God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.»

On Arabs in general, he said in 2001, «It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.» In 2009 he said of Muslims «their religion is as ugly as they are.»

That sort of rhetoric, when heard from Arab or Iranian clerics directed towards Israelis or Jews in general is usually (and rightly) harshly condemned by Israeli leaders like Netanyahu as beyond the pale.

Yosef also had regressive views on the role of women and gays in society. In 2007, angry that many Ashkenazi rabbis supported allowing women to say a blessing over Shabbat candles after they’d been lit, he said: «Women should make (stew) and not deal with matters of the Torah.» He said that anyone disagree with him was the fault of «a few stupid women. A woman’s knowledge is only in sewing.»

As for gays and lesbians, he said they were «completely evil.»

To be sure, it’s not just in Israel where Yosef was popular. Bill de Blasio, the democrat who’s the current front-runner to be mayor of New York, had this to say about the departed rabbi today:

In the late 18th century the philosopher Jeremy Bentham developed a new type of institutional establishment which had a singular advantage over its predecessors: it allowed the authorities to observe inmates without their being able to tell in any particular moment whether or not they were being watched. The name given to this new architectural form of state control was Panopticon, literally meaning «watch all».

In our modern digital world the bricks and mortar of Bentham’s Panopticon have been replaced by a network of cyber-surveillance systems. Now the inmates are not incarcerated criminals or the unhappy occupants of the asylums but potentially everyone on the planet, or at least anyone who has actively embraced the internet. Certainly, that is what the revelations about Prism seem to suggest. But is the deployment of such all-encompassing and apparently indiscriminate surveillance systems itself lawful? Is this something which as a matter of law we are obliged to tolerate, despite its ostensibly chilling effect on civil liberties?

Answering those questions from the perspective of our domestic law is not easy. This is not least because the law governing the use of surveillance by the state in the UK is complex, and still relatively untested. Those who have dipped their toes into the murky world of surveillance law will know there are typically three legal regimes which have to be considered, all of which focus to a greater or lesser extent on the concept of personal privacy.

First, there is Article 8 of the European convention on human rights, incorporated into domestic law through provisions in the Human Rights Act 1998. Article 8 recognises that all human beings enjoy a fundamental right to privacy. This right certainly extends to an individual’s private online activities. A state agency that snoops on an individual’s private e-activities will be acting unlawfully for the purposes of Article 8 unless the interference with privacy rights can be justified.

An interference will be justified only if it is both in accordance with the law and necessary in order to serve certain specified legitimate aims, including the aims of preserving national security, public safety or economic wellbeing. Importantly, an interference with privacy rights will not be lawful for Article 8 purposes if it is disproportionate. Put simply, the state cannot lawfully use a surveillance sledgehammer to crack a small albeit socially offensive nut.

Second, there is the Data Protection Act 1998, derived from the European data protection directive. This is a fairly intricate enactment that embodies a number of detailed rules relating to the circumstances in which personal data – including not only written information but also photographs, voice recordings and other recorded data – may lawfully be processed. The conceptual spinal cord on which the rules hang is that personal data must be managed in a way that avoids excessive infringements of privacy rights. In that sense, the effects of the Data Protection Act are similar to those of Article 8. The data protection rules will certainly provisionally apply to any personal data which may be obtained by the UK government from a foreign state, and also to any the government may itself wish to transfer abroad.

However, critically, the rules are effectively disapplied in any case where the government certifies that this is necessary for the purposes of safeguarding national security. The scope for challenging a national security certificate is very limited. Perhaps even more significantly, the affected individuals will only be able to contemplate a challenge if they know the state has disapplied the rules in their case. The difficulty here is that the disapplication of the rules may itself result in a situation where individuals are kept in the dark about what is happening to their data.

Third, there is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa). This fiendishly complex enactment is essentially intended to set out the circumstances in which secret surveillance activities undertaken by the state must be treated as lawful. Thus, for example, it sets out the circumstances in which individuals may lawfully be subject to surveillance (like using surveillance devices or covert human intelligence sources). It is clear that Ripa was enacted above all in order to ensure that the state was not using the veil of secrecy to conduct surveillance activities which unjustly interfered with the privacy rights of citizens.

But a fundamental difficulty with Ripa, as with the Data Protection Act, is that it is difficult to detect when abuses are taking place. The secret nature of the surveillance being undertaken means that the subjects of the surveillance are themselves not in a position to hold the relevant authorities to account.

Standing back from the detail, two things become clear. First, as a matter of domestic law, any surveillance system deployed by the state must operate in a proportionate manner. It is hard to see how any surveillance system that enabled the state indiscriminately to capture data relating to millions of law-abiding citizens could ever satisfy the requirements of Article 8. Second, it is a fundamental precondition to the exercise of legal rights that individuals know whether their rights have been infringed. Keeping the public in a state of ignorance about the very existence of super-surveillance systems is constitutionally offensive.

Even if there are good reasons why individual operations must remain secret in the national interest, there surely can be no justification for keeping people in the dark about dramatic expansions in the surveillance state. If super-surveillance systems are as all-encompassing and indiscriminate as the revelations about Prism tend to suggest, then all the more reason why these new modes of state watchfulness should be subject to robust scrutiny by both the public and the courts.

Of course we could simply sit back and accept the assurances given to us by our political leaders that the state can be relied upon to regulate itself, that it will scrupulously turn its attentions only to those who clearly seek to threaten our comfortable existence. But such a trusting, laissez-faire attitude is inherently naive. Our liberty as citizens depends very substantially on our ability to safeguard ourselves against arbitrary interference and excessive control by the state. If we abnegate our own responsibility to watch over the state’s burgeoning surveillance activities, the price we will pay is an inevitable loss of personal liberty in the face of an increasingly data-bloated and overweening state.

The documentary In the Shadow of Hermes by Jüri Lina shows how freemasons, international bankers, and communists joined forces in an unholy alliance and through the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 established in Russia the most brutal and dehumanizing slave society the world has ever seen.

Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974 admonished his countrymen:
«Live without lies!» This applies equally to the West. The Truth in our time is in no way self-evident. Most official facts about communism are not true. Solzhenitsyn emphasized: «In our country the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the state.»

The facts have been suppressed both in the East and the West.

The film «In the Shadow of Hermes» is an important documentation of those financial masonic forces that cold-bloodedly worked behind the scenes through communism to profit from the suffering of others.

The director, Jüri Lina, stresses that it is his duty to tell the truth about communism and its grey eminences, and not just superficially treat its psychopathic symptoms, while the truth today is not highly valued.

History is made every day, but by whom? The answer is given in this film, the aim of which is to unmask the truth, despite the falsifications of history, so meekly reported by the media.

To know the real history of communism is the best insurance against ideological impostors. Based on the book «Under the Sign of the Scorpion» by the Estonian dissident Jüri Lina who narrates this documentary in Swedish.

Only hours after two bombs were detonated near the finish line of a Boston marathon, evidence is beginning to emerge suggesting that the act may have been a false flag attack.

While reports continue to emerge from the scene, a number of facts point toward the typical setup used to devise, control, and execute such an attack as took place around the 9/11, 7/7, and OKC bombings as well as the Aurora and Sandy Hook shootings.

One of the hallmark signals of a false flag attack, as Webster Tarpley has expertly demonstrated in his book, 9/11 Synthetic Terror, is the use of drills acting as a cover for sinister plans and mechanizations within the halls of the shadow government itself which ultimately manifest as false flag terror attacks. Much like the aforementioned attacks, the Boston Bombing also carried the trademark “coincidence” of a drill scheduled to take place at almost exactly the same time that the bombs were being detonated at the marathon.

For instance, earlier in the morning of April 15, 2013, the Boston Globe tweeted “Officials: There will be a controlled explosion opposite the library within one minute as part of bomb squad activities.”

In addition, it was reported by Business Insider in the article “2 More Explosive Devices Found At Boston Marathon,”[1] that a police scanner “said police were going to do a third, controlled explosion on the 600 Block of Boylston Street.”

Yet, despite the fact that the police had scheduled a highly “coincidental” explosion at the JFK Library, much of the mainstream reports regarding the device have presented it as another part of the Boston Bombing itself.

In fact, the New York Post reported almost the polar opposite of the Boston Globe in regards to the second device. It said, “Police confirmed a third explosion at JFK Library in Boston. Boston fire officials confirmed during a press conference that the third explosion was linked to the ones that occurred at the Marathon. There were no injuries reported from the third bombing.”

Andrew Katz of TIME tweeted that “police were investigating reports of bombs in other parts of the city,” and “Citing a police scanner, Katz tweeted that there was an ‘incendiary device’ possible at JFK Library as well as ‘another device’ in front of Boston’s luxury Mandarin Hotel.”

Business Insider also reported that, around 3 p.m., there was a fire inside the JFK Library but states that it was not related to the “terrorist bombings.” This, as I mentioned, is in direct contradiction to the later reports that the “fire” was actually an explosion related to the terror bombing.

Thus, we have a device planted inside the library by the police and confirmation that an explosion at the library was connected to the Boston Bombing. This fact alone should be enough to raise questions regarding the individuals responsible for the bombing. If the police had planted a device inside the Library and the explosion was related to the Boston Bombing, should there not be an immediate investigation of the police?

It should also be noted that Chris Faraone of the Boston Phoenix also tweeted that a police officer near the finish line stated, “There are secondary devices that have been found and are unexploded.”

Also interesting, however, is the fact that the University of Mobile’s Cross Country Coach, Ali Stevenson, stated that bomb sniffing dogs were present at both the start and finish lines.

Speaking to Local 15, the local Boston news station, Stevenson stated, “They kept making announcements on the loud speaker that it was just a drill and there was nothing to worry about. It seemed like there was some sort of threat, but they kept telling us it was just a drill.”

At this time, law enforcement officials state that they have identified a suspect, a Saudi national currently in the hospital for shrapnel wounds. One must also wonder if this individual is nothing more than a mere patsy in yet another government-sponsored false flag. It is highly dubious that an individual (with the exception of a suicide bomber which this individual’s survival excludes him from) setting off such powerful bombs would stand so close to them as to be injured by shrapnel.

Ali Stevenson also stated that there was no doubt in his mind that the bombings were intentional and this much is quite clear.

The question, however, is who was behind them?

As Mike Adams of Natural News writes, “It’s far too early to take an informed guess on all this. However, it is indisputable that the FBI is actively engaged in carrying out bomb plots in the United States, then halting them at the last minute to “catch the terrorists.” This fact has been covered by the New York Times, among other publications.”

Indeed. And the track record of the FBI, as well as other elements of the governmental establishment, should be reason enough for us to continue watching these developments and the subsequent claims made by these agencies and individuals.

There is a Skype trojan going around that is turning PCs into Bitcoin miners. So far, victims are mostly located in countries like Italy, Russia, Poland, Costa Rica, Spain, Germany, and a few others. Bitcoin Mining is a another way for users to acquire Bitcoin’s currency by “making computer hardware do mathematical calculations for the Bitcoin network to confirm transactions and increase security.”

The trojan is going around via a Skype instant message. The translated message says, “This is my favorite picture of you”, and provides a shortened link. The trojan is spreading quickly, with an average 2000 clicks per hour. Kaspersky has identified the trojan as “Trojan.Win32.Jorik.IRCbot.xkt”, and the process it runs as bitcoin-miner.exe. The malware connects to a C2 server located in Germany with the IP address: 213.165.68.138:9000.

The malware immediately takes control of your computer and increases the victim’s CPU usage drastically. While the trojan’s primary use is for Bitcoin mining, it’s not its only capability. Bitcoin mining isn’t lucrative with just one PC, however, if there are many PCs infected and aimed towards a specific Bitcoin mining pool, it can be worthwhile.

This new trojan is speculated to have surfaced due to the meteoric rise in Bitcoin value. Late last month, it was reported that the value of a Bitcoin was $92, a number that has now reached about $140. The constant rise in value of Bitcoin is more than enough to drive many devious hackers to get creative. So in order to protect yourself from being infected, make sure to get an anti-virus software, and keep it up-to-date. Also be wary of suspicious Skype messages and shortened URLs. We’ll keep you updated if there are any resolutions to this issue.